Summary Of At The Dark End Of The Street

Throughout history and today, the American Civil Rights Movement has been portrayed in many forms, such as museum exhibitions, school curriculums, movies, social media, and activism. They all portray the American Civil Rights Movement as a fight for equality and justice. However, many representations of the American Civil Rights Movement ignore the crucial roles played by African American women and how race and gender interacted during this period. Gender had an impact on the experiences of individuals that were fighting for their rights during civil rights history in twentieth-century America. It is important to note that gender shaped how people experienced discrimination and injustice during the Civil Rights Movement. Compared to men, African

In Danielle McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, the author argues that sexual violence was a way for whites to intimidate and control African Americans during the movement. McGuire points out that because of the sexual violence African American women went through, it allowed them to fight back against the oppression and shape the Civil Rights Movement. The author introduces the readers to the violence that African American women were facing, “The stories of black women who fought for bodily integrity and personal dignity hold profound truths about the sexualized violence that marked racial politics and African American lives during the modern civil rights movement.” (pg xx). This quote gives readers a broader understanding of African American women's challenges. It gives a scope of how oppressed these women were and allows people to gain a deeper understanding of one of the ways that sparked women becoming so heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement. McGuire uses several types of primary and secondary sources in the text. The author uses a secondary source, Jim Crow America, written by Earl Conrad, to describe the town of Abbeville. A primary source that the author uses is a newspaper article published by the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. In the secondary source written by Earl Conrad, there is a description of Abbeville, “Taylor, her husband, and their three-year-old daughter, Joyce Lee, rented one of these cabins at the bottom of a rust colored hill just outside of town. Here Parks scribbled notes as she listened to Taylor testify about the vicious attack” (pg 6). McGuire included this quote because the NAACP sent a famous activist like Rosa Parks to investigate the Recy Taylor case and because of how important the case was. The quote brings out how important these cases were.